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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27037996">Conticent Cyngus</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfPlotTwists/pseuds/QueenOfPlotTwists'>QueenOfPlotTwists</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [15]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime &amp; Manga)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>31 Days Of Halloween, Forbidden Love, Ghosts, Halloween Challenge, M/M, October Prompt Challenge, Rated For Violence, Reincarnation, Swan Maids, Tendershipping, Thief King Bakura | Yami Bakura Has His Own Body, graveyards</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 18:22:08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,217</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27037996</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfPlotTwists/pseuds/QueenOfPlotTwists</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Bakura, a drifter and an orphan haunted by visions of a life he cannot remember, cuts through a graveyard on his way "home" when he hears someone singing, and meets the most hypnotic young man he'd ever seen</p><p>Part 15 of 31 Days of Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge </p><p>Prompt 20: Silence</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bakura Ryou/Yami Bakura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [15]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947991</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Conticent Cyngus</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/zephyrdragon362/gifts">zephyrdragon362</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Another one that barely made the deadline...this one has an interesting history because I've anted to write it for a while and just when I thought I had the plot, it ended up completely evolving from my original idea by end...<br/>This was inspired by a dream I had of an anime girl in a puritan costume dancing on a hill and singing, a collection of traditional murder ballads and folk songs based on the theme and several conversations with zephyrdragon362 about grave soil, ironically enough XD</p><p>Part 15 of 31 Days of Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge https://horrificmemes.tumblr.com/post/165553173026/31-horrific-days-v2-october-writing-challenge</p><p>Prompt 20: Silence</p><p>Song: The Bonny Swans by Loreena McKennitt</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Conticent Cyngus</p><p> </p><p>The night was silent and sinister, as Bakura cut through the graveyard. The lovely graves stood in silent witness, singing their stories in the language of stones, spinning tales of lives lost, days pasts and eras long forgotten by time.</p><p>Forgotten, or abandoned.</p><p>He did not know which—neither of the cemetery whose graves stood like stone pillars among a blanket of thick grass and undergrowth, having long since given way to wildness and willows bent over graves like mourners or of himself.</p><p>An asylum was no place to grow up and yet without his parent’s protection, forfeited when they caught him talking to imaginary things he claimed were real, there was no other place for him in polite society.</p><p>Schizophrenia they called it, as though he were some exotic animal in a cage at the zoo.</p><p>Madman, they had called him behind his back and among aristocratic circles who looked for any reason to make themselves sound superior.</p><p>Freak, was the word used by those more mean-spirited.</p><p>And yet no one has tried to find him after he escaped. No one contacted the police or his parents or bothered to search. And that was just fine with him. It gave him the freedom to move on. To start over to live. If you could call a life as a drifter on the road constantly moving from job to job, place to place and town to town living. He got by just fine and yet always there was this emptiness. This ache in his chest that been there long before his parents sent him away. This feeling of displacement that longed for something that was stronger than acceptance. Something not even the daydreams and hallucinations he envisioned or the voices he heard during these fits, as the doctors called them, could fill, though they certainly claim close.</p><p>Perhaps that was why he always felt more comfortable in quiet, abandoned, forgotten places like this cemetery, and why none of his treatments had worked. Here, in the silence, he could hear music and laughter, could feel warmth and touch, see, hear and smell the world around him that felt both homely familiar and just out of reach, like the last fading fragment of a memory before it was long forgotten.</p><p>Those visions, whatever they were. Made him feel home, loves, alive. And yet, as he sat himself down besides one of the tombstones, he could not deny they also caused him pain—the undeniable grief of lost love, and the aching that never truly went away. Perhaps that was why he’d stayed as long as he did, endured the treatments and the ridicule, in the false, faint hope that perhaps the pain would disappear along with the visions. It was a false, fleeting dream, a smokescreen disguised as hope, one that he had wisely discarded long ago the night he’d picked the locks of his cell and the manacles strapping him to the bed. By the guards noticed he was gone, he’d time he’d shimmied down the walls and was mikes away from the grounds, the bitterness of his youth nothing more than a distant nightmare.</p><p>After that he’d bounced from place to place searching for home, and finding peace only in places like this. In a fog strewn graveyard overgrown with weeds and weeping willows arched over the tombstones like widows weeping for lost loves, and the silence itself seemed to be singing.</p><p>“Oh sister, oh sister, pray lend me your hand, and I will give you wealth and land”</p><p>He shot up, eyes wide. That wasn’t silence: that was <em>real.</em> Someone was <em>singing</em>.</p><p>“I'll give you neither hand nor glove, unless you give me your own true love.”</p><p>The voice was low and sweet, a melodious rasp that arched and pitched with the vocals of the song’s dark words.</p><p>“Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go! Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go!”</p><p> It called to him, drew him in like a siren’s, though he could not call it ethereal or seductive. Rather it was…familiar.</p><p>“He made harp pins of her fingers fair, He made harp strings of her golden hair”</p><p>He followed, it chased, ran through the maze of headstones and hills, listening for the loudness that echoed in the silence.</p><p>“He laid the harp upon the stone and straight it began to play alone. Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go! Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go!”</p><p>Deeper into the woods he ventures, finding a wide stream that curved and cut through the cemetery like a scar. Mist rolled off its service, a lace work of silver tendrils glittering in the wisps of moonlight. The silver sphere rippled in the dark waters and illuminated the frosty green leaves of the willows, their backs curved liked arched over their river and their slim, slender branches thick with leaves, draped and spilled over like the hair of a drowned woman, their trunks and roots a single slender arm and many-finger hand whose fingers spread and disappeared beneath the inky blackness of the waters. And there sitting upon one of the low hanging trunks, hands curled happily about the branches and kicking his feet with all the fearless innocence of a young child, he spotted a boy, singing.</p><p>“There does sit my father, the King and yonder sits my mother the Queen” He belched the voluminous notes with no fear of being caught or heard, and kicked out his pale, perfect feet, sending tiny splashes and giggling when his toes touched the water.</p><p>He giggled before continuing to sing “and there does sit my brother Hugh and by him William, sweet and true.” Jewel-like giggled gave way to laughter like a bell, ringing in his heart, stirring something so shockingly familiar that for a moment he could not breathe. The sweet round face curved into a smile, blushes bloomed like roses upon his pale, round cheeks, his eyes were closed so he could not see their color, but the smile that tugged at his lips was sweet and angelic. Long white hair, glittered like starlight and fell down his back in spiky waves. His clothing was odd: instead of a tee-shirt and jeans or some other more modern wardrobe, he wore what could only be described as a costume: a long white petticoat skirt whose ruffled bunched about his bare legs, over which he wore a black waistcoat with a white collar like a Puritan woman. Was he coming home from a costume party?</p><p>“Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go! Hi-dee-ho, Hi-dee-ho, the bonny swans do go!”</p><p>Bakura watched as the boy rose, stood barefoot upon the willow branch, the tendrils draping comfortingly over his shoulders like a mother’s hands, or a lover’s. He turned away from Bakura as he sang the final verse, the brightness of his voice darkening with a new sort of passion. “And there does sit my false sister Anne who drowned me for the sake of a man.”</p><p>Bakura watched him as he walked across the branch and stepped off onto the carpet of grass, turning as though he meant to leave.</p><p>“Wait!” Bakura called out to him.</p><p>The boy gasped and spun around revealing the secret he’d kept earlier.</p><p>Bakura froze, swallowed as gasp, stared into large, dark eyes, deep and black and beautiful as the star strewn sky, illuminated all the more by the lovely lily-like paleness of his skin and hair.</p><p>Anyone else would’ve apologized for scaring him, tried to convince him to stay with sweet words. Bakura was not such a person, and instead he stepped, almost menacingly out of the shadows, revealing himself in all his gruffness, with no effort to hide. “You’re out late,” was all he said, his smile sharp.</p><p>The boy did not flinch or look surprise. Instead, he smiled, a bright sweet almost naïve smile, but Bakura cause the mischief behind his eyes. “I could say the same thing about you.” Came the seductive purr that did not match the angelic smile that curved his cheeks. “What brings you down to the willows in the dark of the night?”</p><p>“I was walking home,” Bakura explained, only half a lie, he was walking home, he just didn’t have a home. “You’re bold to be singing in a graveyard.”</p><p>“Why thank you,” he skipped closer towards him, bare feet sinking into the soft earth, his hands folded, sweetly behind his back, though Bakura suspected this boy was nowhere near as innocent or as angelic as he presented himself. “Did you enjoy it?” he cocked his head, almost birdlike with curiousty, but the coquettish was in wish he asked the question, shattered the illusion.</p><p>Bakura purposely waited until the boy stepped closer before answering. “I did.” He leaned forward until they were a whisper’s breath away. “And what may I ask inspired that story?” He teased, knowing well it was a nursery rhyme he’d heard from long ago, though a far tamer version than the one the boy sang.</p><p>The boy looked away, eyes distant. “No one’s but my own.”</p><p><em>That</em> surprised him. “You’re alone then.” It was not a questions.</p><p>“I am,” the boy nodded.</p><p>“I see, that’s past me as well.”</p><p>“Is your family dead too?” Ryou asked, eyes and smile sympathetic.</p><p>“No,” Bakura retorted with a bitter snort. “But they wish <em>I </em>was.”</p><p>“Why is that?” Ryou asked, neither piteous nor curious, merely wanting to understand.</p><p>“I see things, <em>experience </em>things that others can’t.” <em>Never</em> had he spoken it so openly before. “They branded me a freak because of it and my parents preferred to lock me away.”</p><p>“Rubbish!” the boy snapped, furious with an indignant anger that Bakura had never seen or expected before. It took him several long moments to realize the twisted rage evident all over his face and the indignant fury burning his eyes was on <em>his</em> behalf. “Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish! I’ve never heard such hogwash!” He ranted and stomped about with a furious temper and then collapsed against the bark of the willow’s trunk, sliding into the nest of its roots as if exhausted by his own outburst. His hands shaking and what appeared to be wetness dampened his cheeks. He palmed his eyes, and Bakura heard sniffles.</p><p>He was crying. For <em>him.</em></p><p>“I’m so sorry,” the boy apologize, his voice broken. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. No one deserves to be betrayed like that.”</p><p>Overcome by some strange foreign emotions he neither, knew nor recognized. Bakura swept forward, dropped to his knees and enveloped the boy in a hug. “Thank you,” he choked out in a whisper, the words foreign and thick on his tongue from the amount of times he’d been forced to say it without meaning at the asylum. “No one’s…no one’s ever been on my side like that before.” His shaking hands gripped his knees.</p><p>“I’ll always be by your side.” Pale, slender hands cupped his cheek and lifted his confused face and Bakura found himself looking into eyes as deep and black and secretive as shadows. “Just like I promised.” And he pressed his lips to Bakura’s,</p><p>Visions burst behind Bakura’s eyes, images seen only by starlight and shadow, became prismatic and vibrant. Suddenly, he saw himself but not himself, a disembodied spirit forced to watch its corporal form in silence. Watched as he unenthusiastically dismounted a carriage and felt his heart spike when he met not the lord’s young daughter, but his bold and lively son. Saw himself dancing in the ballroom with a mysterious woman who was the gossip of the town, only he knew the <em>lady</em>’s true identity, saw him sneak out into the hallway where the boy leapt into his arms and leaned up for a kiss, and kiss him he did. Kissed him and shoved him up against the wall and hiked up the skirts he wore as a disguise. Watch as they stole away into the dark of the night sown to this very sport and made love into all hours of the night.</p><p>These were the visions that haunted his dreams and waking hours, the visions that he saw but no one else did, not visions, he realized now, but memories. Memories of the life he’d lost, the lover he’d lost—the lover whose face was always veiled in shadow and obscurity.</p><p>No longer.</p><p>“Ryou,” Bakura pulled away with the name on his lips, stared deep into the boy’s dark eyes, into <em>Ryou’s</em> eyes. “I remember.”</p><p>Joyful tears glistened in the boy’s eyes like rhinestones and he threw himself into the man’s welcoming arms, embracing him like he’d vanish if he let go. Bakura caught him eagerly and kissed him over and over and over again, sampling his sweetness and converting it to memory. The feel of his lily soft skin, the softness of his hair, the perfume of his scent. All those details came back with breathtaking clarity and with it all that he had lost, all that he had been missing, all that had left an unbearable ache in his heart whose origin he now understood.</p><p>“Oh God…what happened?” His voice was rough, and choked on anguish and unshed tears, confusion and blanks left him confused and frightened and he pulled Ryou tighter in his arms, terrifies he’d vanish into the mists if he let go.</p><p>“That night,” Ryou began, shaking. “I came here to meet you, just like we promise. My father…he was starting to suspect us, told me that if I did not end it he would have you hanged. We planned to run away together that night, I waited for you but…Amane came instead.”</p><p><em>Amane</em>, the name sparked something in Bakura’s mind and he became enraged as he remembered. Amane, the Lord’s daughter whom he’d been “promised” to by no one’s decision but her own. Amane, who got it in her head that because he father spoiled her with whatever she wanted, <em>he</em> was obligated to do the same. Amane, who refused his rejections and forced her advances upon him despite his disgust towards her. Amane, who whispered evil, disturbing things into her father’s ear in a selfish, vindictive attempt to make him hers.</p><p>“She accused me of stealing you from her. Called me a thief and a harlot,” Ryou snorted bitterly. “She said if she couldn’t have you, then no one could, <em>especially</em> not me…”</p><p>“She killed you,” Bakura growled: a dangerously low and harsh bite of sound. “It <em>was</em> her, she drowned you, didn’t she?”</p><p>Ryou could not answer, not at first. He did not have to.</p><p>“I knew it,” Bakura hissed, his hands shaking. “When she came back that night, in disarray and said you fell into the river and drowned, that she’d tried to save you…I knew, I <em>knew</em> she was lying. I saw it in her eyes, beyond those tears, I saw the way she looked at me, <em>expecting </em>me to come to her now that you were gone…”</p><p>He remembered everything now. Remember the devastating echo of <em>drowned</em> in his blank mind. Remembered the rage and the anguish poisoning his heart. Remembered his hands around her throat as he screamed <em>Liar. Murder. Kin-slayer. </em></p><p>Ryou shook in his arms and Bakura squeezed him tighter, knowing the physical touch would mean more than some silly shushing sounds or sweet words. Ryou never needed sweet words or pretty promises, and he never gave them. “I would’ve done it had they not dragged me off of her,” he confessed, feeling numb but not quite remorseful. “They were going to hang me, but Amane said that she could convince your father that I merely reacted in a mad fit of grief and that if I only apologized she could see that I was released.”</p><p>“I trust she did not offer so much for free,” Ryou met his gaze bitterly, knowing his sister only too well.</p><p>Bakura snorted in disgust but nonetheless nodded. “She would accept nothing less than my asking for her hand in marriage. I told her to fetch her father, and that vicious little bitch was so convinced of her victory she practically skipped out of the cell to do so.” A sinister smile slit his face. “I only wish I could’ve seen her face when they found my body hanging in that cell. It was my final act of vengeance against her.” He frowned then. “But I don’t understand…why was I…” It was only then he realized Ryou’s costume wasn’t a costume. “Why was I reincarnated…and not you?”</p><p>Ryou bowed his head and carefully unwound himself from the fierce embrace. “Because I didn’t drown that night, Bakura.” He stood met his lover’s confused eyes, his smile sad. “Well,” he rubbed his arm. “I <em>did</em> but…something happened.”</p><p>“What happened?” Bakura asked getting to his feet.</p><p>Ryou said nothing merely stepped onto the woody roots of the willow’s trunk, and stepped down towards the water. Bakura watched confused as Ryou’s bare feet slid closer to the blackness. And screamed when he leapt in.</p><p>“Ryou!” he dove toward the slope, gasping in horror as Ryou disappeared beneath the rippling blackness with a splash. He stared at the blackness, at the empty abyss that had consumed his lover not once, but twice and begged, pleaded for his return. Suddenly the water stirred and he leapt back as the surface shattered—and with a single, elegant swoop a magnificent swan broke the surface, and looked at him with beautiful, bead-black eyes and a tortured expression.</p><p>Recognition and realization bulged Bakura’s eyes.</p><p>When the swan once more dove beneath the waves, he was still surprised when Ryou reached out from the water with a gasp and pulled himself up onto the willow’s lowest branch and hurled himself onto it, petticoats drenched, hair soaked and yet the water seemed to slide off him as he fluttered ethereally to the ground.</p><p>He stood before his lover, eyes downcast. “I thought it was my punishment…you lost your life because of me, so I had to live not knowing if your soul had moved on or not….I cannot ask you to do so ag—”</p><p>His protests were swallowed by a kiss so strong and possessive, he nearly lost his balance under the force of it, but a strong arm wrapped aggressively around his waist and pulled him taunt against him. The kiss was rough, and hard and soul-consuming and Ryou melted into it savoring those hot lips he’d missed so much.</p><p>“After all this time,” Bakura pulled away with surprising gentleness, his whisper of his words more than a promise. “And you still haven’t realized…”</p><p>He lifted Ryou’s chin and locked their dark eyes, no doubt or hesitation in either his voice or his expression. “You <em>are</em> my life.”</p><p>Ryou said nothing. He did not need too. He rose to his feet, took Bakura’s hand in his and back-stepped towards the slope of the river. Bakura followed him fearlessly. Their gazes locked in fearless passion and trust. Together the descended the steps the of the willow’s roots, stepped into the black waters, sank, deeper and deeper, until the water enclosed like shadows over their heads.</p><p>Together they sank into the abyss, and then two star-bright swans burst through the surface.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Of all the short pieces I've done for this, this one is my favorite--or at least top five, top three, mostly because of the transition it's gone through.<br/>I love writing Ryou and the Conjure series made me realize how LONG its been since I wrote him and just got to have fun writing him so I really wanted to give him his own story.<br/>Originally, he was going to be a ghost in a graveyard in this story, but the plot evaded me until I was inspired by a series of murder ballads, which as their name suggests are folk songs detailing crimes of passion, a short story i read inspired by the Murder Ballad's song Where the Roses Grow also helped.<br/>Originally, Bakura was going to be an orphan servant in Ryou's home whom he fell in love with because his blunt, brutally honest and crass personality was the opposite of the pompous and hypocritical aristocrats he frequented but when Ryou's father found out and tried to have Bakura hanged for kidnapping and Rape, Ryou freed him and they originally planned to commit suicide together but while Ryou became a ghost Bakura was reincarnated...and that was the plot I went into writing this until I finished the first page and then once writing this, the song Bonny Swans by Loreena McKennitt (one of my favorite songs) which is based on the murder ballad the Twas Sisters where the oldest sister kills the youngest sister in order to marry her fiance, the girl is then reincarnated first as a swan and then as a harp, who sings her story on her own and exposes her sister when a bard brings it to her father's castle. It's a spectacular song and story and the song Ryou sings is loosely based off it...from there the story practically wrote itself and Amane became the villain and Ryou became a swan and honestly I love it SO much more because of it!<br/>I as actually nervous about the part where Bakura and Ryou met, but just like with Yami, no one I write in a relationship with Bakura cares for small talk.</p><p>I'm super proud of this story...work made it tough to get done but I am So proud of it!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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